Most people agree that there is “pretty privilege” in the world. But few talk about its sinister counterpart. Because if there is truly “pretty privilege,” then we must also acknowledge that there is “ugly oppression.” So I ask—In a world increasingly ruled by appearance and beauty, what does it mean to be an “ugly” member of society?
The topic of ugliness and beauty is difficult to discuss, as it is amorphous and ever-changing. There are no exact parameters for what makes a person ugly or beautiful. It is something felt and experienced rather than strictly defined. But that does not make it any less real.
Beauty may be “in the eye of the beholder” at the individual level, but at the societal level, there are standards that people either meet or do not meet. That’s not an indictment of character, it’s a fact. And if we do not acknowledge it, then we cannot have a productive conversation about the struggles that come with it.
Because there are many serious struggles that come with being ugly. Being ugly isn’t simply a matter of superficial disinterest. If you are ugly, people might deny you work, question your moral character, or even treat you as sub-human. And that says much more about our society than anything else. It is not wrong for there to be standards of beauty. But our treatment of those who fall outside those norms is incredibly indicative of the political climate and state of society.
And I must say—our current reactions/treatment do not speak well of us.
The science of “ugly”
Before I begin this discussion, I feel it necessary to establish that not only is “ugliness” real, but it is natural. There are numerous studies examining how attractiveness influences human behavior, and the results are consistent. We treat those we deem unattractive worse than those we see as attractive.
We consider beautiful people more intelligent, capable, kind, clean, and even moral than unattractive people. Even from birth, there is a difference in treatment. In one study, pictures of “cute” newborn babies were mixed in with newborns with “falsely mature” or unattractive features. People imagined the latter to be “difficult and irritable” and felt less willing to care for those babies.
In another study of abused children under court protection from California and Massachusetts, “it turned out that a disproportionate number of them were unattractive. This wasn’t because they were badly groomed or bore unhappier facial expressions than other children. Rather, abused kids had head and face proportions that made them look less infantile and cute” (Survival of the Prettiest 36).
It’s unfortunate, but natural. And it works the other way around, too. In a study by psychologist Judith Langlois, infants as young as 3–8 months old had preferences for more “beautiful” faces.
While our superego and morals would have us believe that we are above such superficial judgments of others, our behavior speaks otherwise. There is an inherent evolutionary aversion to ugliness. We cannot be blamed for these implicit biases. They formed over centuries in order to ensure our survival. But we are also not insensate beasts incapable of overcoming such baser instincts. And we must be held accountable for how far we allow these things to be taken.
The “ugly” experience
If I had to boil down the “ugly experience” to one thing, I wouldn’t say it’s a lack of self-esteem or a strong feeling of self-hatred, as one may think. Instead, as I scrolled through Reddit forums and hundreds of TikTok comments from self-proclaimed “ugly” people, I found that they had one thing in common: people treated them horribly.
There are two dominant modes of existence for the “ugly” person in our society—either the invisible person or the pariah.
“I also have depression/health issues, so my weight has fluctuated a ton over the years. I would always think I looked terrible, but I could tell when I officially ‘lost enough’ again, because it was like I would literally pop into focus for people. It’s like there’s an actual tipping point where I start to have value again.” (furious_george, Buzzfeed).
“Ugly” people live in a completely different world than attractive or even average people. They have to carry themselves differently, not because of a lack of self-confidence, but because everything they do is treated differently. If they make a mistake, then it’s because they’re a bad person with bad intentions. If they try to flirt with someone, then they’re a creepy freak. Even something as simple as existing with someone more attractive can be seen as lowering the value of the person they’re with.
How “ugly” affects the mind
As I listened to all of these people’s stories, I was shocked at the beauty I found. Even the comments were aghast that anyone could consider these people unattractive. With many people convinced that this was a bit for attention. But I can assure you, it’s not.
If you are someone who has never been considered “ugly” before, you might never understand what it feels like. It doesn’t matter what you look like. And it doesn’t matter how much you don’t care what other people think about you. If people treat you a certain way your entire life, it’s going to affect how you feel about yourself.
I can speak from experience. I don’t think I’m particularly attractive or unattractive by traditional American beauty standards. Since I’m mixed-race Hawaiian and Jewish, I tend to fall outside either end of the beauty spectrum. Which means that some people find me incredibly attractive, and others treat me as if I’m literally invisible.
Despite what my friends and family may think, I’m not trying to be humble. Have you ever had a cat caller be unsure whether he wanted to holler at you? Because I have. He hollered at every girl that passed, until he got to me and mumbled in an uncertain and confused tone, “Hey! …you’re… kind of cute, …maybe?”
I’m deadass. I wasn’t sure whether to feel insulted, and frankly, I still don’t know. But that should give you a basic understanding of where I stand in the world.
That kind of stuff doesn’t bother me, though. I’m bothered by the constant double standard. The classmates constantly targeting me in games, because I tried to joke or have fun. The staff yelling at me in club activities, because I “looked” rude, even though I was doing extra work. Meeting new people and having them look right through me, to talk to my more attractive friends. Being unattractive isn’t about feeling bad about your appearance. It’s living with the constant reminder that your status is lower than those around you.
Societal enforcement of beauty standards
If being attractive/unattractive were as simple as personal preferences, then this wouldn’t be such a big issue. After all, you can’t exactly control what you like. But because ugliness has more to do with social status than with physical attractiveness, there are more factors at play.
Regardless of whether someone personally finds you attractive, being considered “ugly” by the majority can be reason enough not to pursue you. In the same way that a noble dating a peasant in the 18th century could lower the status of the noble, dating an “ugly” person now could lower the status of the person associated with them.
And nowhere was that more obvious to me than the discussion started by @blackryanseacrest on TikTok.
I want you to pay close attention to the language he uses. In his mind, dating an ugly person is just as bad as dating a pedophile. That understanding goes beyond connecting appearance to moral character; it’s equating social unattractiveness with an actual crime.
This is obviously a blunt and extreme take—as proven by the comments rightfully calling him out—but his mentality didn’t come out of nowhere. There is a silent culture that enforces these ideas, and brought him to this way of thinking. A culture that dates back as far as Plato, Aristotle, and Sappho, who understood “mortal beauty as a reflection of ideal beauty.”
“Ugliness was a sign of the bad, mad, or dangerous. Deformities, ugliness, and disease were seen as stigmas branded onto the body by a wrathful God. [Baldassare] Castiglione said, ‘For the most part the ugly are also evil.’ In the sixteenth century Francis Bacon wrote, ‘Deformed persons are… (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection'” (Survival of the Prettiest, 41).
Being around a person society deems “unattractive” can create similar feelings to being associated with a criminal. Regardless of whether you actually find that person physically attractive. In this way, society finds a way to use our innate appreciation for aesthetic beauty and desire to belong to a community in order to criminalize some people’s very existence.
The colonialism, white supremacy, and economics of beauty standards
While certain concepts of symmetry, facial harmony, and health remain consistent across cultures and time periods’ understanding of beauty, it is a fallacy to believe there’s a universal or “evolutionary” beauty ideal. That is not to say that there aren’t evolutionary predispositions to the appreciation of beauty, but that there is no singular set of characteristics that defines that aesthetic appreciation.
What a society considers “beautiful” is determined less by evolutionary and personal considerations for beauty than by politics. Afghan-German writer and artist, Moshtari Hilal, discusses this topic at length in her book, Ugliness. Rhonda Garelick describes how:
“Ms. Hilal argues that personal aesthetic judgments are neither personal nor “aesthetic.” Instead, our perceptions of human beauty (or its lack) derive from politics, and are determined by wide-ranging, international factors such as war, imperialism, colonial conquest, power hierarchies, and economics” (NYT).
It should be no surprise, then, that our society’s concepts of beauty derive from white supremacy, colonialism, and economics. Beauty is a dangerous and essential tool of these systems. Because we understand it as uncontrollable and automatically link it to ideas of social status and morality, it can be wielded against any number of vulnerable minorities, without much argument.
@kiramekisakurai commented in Buzzfeed’s discussion of pretty privilige:
“I’m on the Central Advisory Committee for my department at school as the graduate student representative. We regularly see a pattern where traditionally attractive*, cisgender, white male (and sometimes female) instructors get higher student evaluation scores than anyone else. ‘Unattractive,’ ‘fat,’ BIPOC and ESOL instructors regularly receive lower scores across the board” (Buzzfeed).
If thin, White Cisgender Heterosexual is the standard of beauty, and ugly people are low-class, immoral, and repugnant, then everyone else is criminal by default. As Hilal writes, “Exclusive beauty is effective because it creates the Not Beautiful… Dehumanization is the real point of modern concepts of beauty. Those who set, regulate, and sell those standards profit the most” (qtd. NYT)
Weaponized beauty
You will find few better examples of weaponized beauty standards than in the Looksmaxxing community. I’ve discussed this community at length before in my analysis of thin beauty ideals, but thinness is only one facet of their ideological assault.
Looksmaxxing exists at the intersection of colonialism, white supremacy, religion, and class warfare. While they masquerade under the illusion of self-improvement and personal “ascension,” their main goal is dehumanization and the creation of the “Not Beautiful” described by Hilal.
Underneath their pseudo-scientific speak, the language they use is clear, “The sexism is direct and unfiltered and sits beside an equally troubling kind of racial essentialism. Facial structures associated with different ethnic groups are described as inherently inferior” (Felix).
But, as David Schilling pointed out in his article in the Guardian, it comes as no surprise that a philosophy built on extreme physical manipulation and strict social castes is eugenics. What troubles me is their focus on a meritocracy of appearance and their biological right to discriminate against those who fall at the bottom rungs of that meritocracy.
Under their belief system, “beauty is attainable through the usual democratic means—hard work and money” (Survival of the Prettiest, 46). It harkens back to the dangerous rhetoric of the Estée Lauder campaigns:
“‘there are no homely women only careless women… you have to want it [beauty] very much and then help it along with some well-chosen products.’ … Women who were dissatisfied with what they saw in the mirror now felt not only unattractive but lazy, inept, or lacking the inner beauty which was supposed to shine forth with good habits and concealer” (Survival of the Prettiest, 46).
In this way, they create an unwinnable game. Not only are they biologically predisposed to having “superior beautiful” features, but they have also earned their status through their upstanding qualities. It makes a disturbing sort of aesthetic-based Mandate of Heaven. A system where they are at the top, and the rest of us can only fight, scratch, and pay our way to get close to their inherent position.
Fighting implicit biases
Looksmaxxers are not fringe lunatics coming out of nowhere. They are a product of the society and culture we enforce. The difference between what they do and what society does is that they take our biases a step further. While many deny that these biases are real, these people know they are real and righteously defend them. Instead of reexamining their prejudices, they take them as higher law. They stick their hands up the ass of scientific thought and use the puppet to protect their inhumane treatment of other people.
Looksmaxxers are not people interested in improving their appearance. They’re power-hungry puppets of corruption in love with subjugation and terrified of diminished status. Because that’s what it truly means to be ugly in this society. It’s a free pass for people to treat you as less than human. The issue has never been that pretty people are afforded privileges. It’s that being ugly takes away your right to human decency.
Whether we like it or not, attractiveness matters. But anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows a cover is not a book. To find certain people unattractive is not wrong. To acknowledge your bias and defend it as the “natural order of things” is.
Implicit biases are natural and uncontrollable, but not insurmountable. The key is you have to know they’re there and want to surmount them. Your patience and commitment to surmounting them make the person you are and the society you want to live in. And I prefer to live in a society where, as Australian author Robert Hoge explains, other more important human qualities are considered.
